Liberal Interventionism, Humanitarian Ethics, and the Responsibility to Protect
In: Global Responsibility to ProtectThis paper examines the lack of engagement between liberal political philosophers and humanitarians on the issue of humanitarian intervention. It argues that the recent emergence of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) agenda provides a great opportunity to overcome this mutual disinterest in each other’s positions. R2P, especially as formulated by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, is fairly demanding. In order to formulate an adequate response, liberals and humanitarians need to reconsider their positions. In this respect, insights provided by liberal political theory are helpful to humanitarians. Firstly, liberal reasoning offers justifications for potential restrictions of the humanitarian scope of concern in the course of halting mass atrocities. Second, liberal values indicate how humanitarians can respond to the challenges posed by post-war reconstruction. Conversely, humanitarian considerations should prompt liberals to think harder about the conduct of military intervention, as well as the material basis of successful post-atrocity reconstruction.
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Alex J. Bellamy, Responsibility to Protect (Cambridge: Polity, 2008).
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Romeo Dallaire, Shake hands with the devil: the failure of humanity in Rwanda (London: Arrow Books, 2005); Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (un), DRC: Mapping Human Rights Violations 1993–2003, August 2010, http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Countries/AfricaRegion/Pages/RDCProjetMapping.aspx, accessed 01 October 2010.
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See, Stephen Krasner, Sovereignty: Organised hypocrisy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
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See Fernando Teson, ‘The Liberal Case for Humanitarian Intervention’; Alexander Leveringhaus, ‘The Moral Status of Combatants during Military Humanitarian Intervention’, Utilitas 24/2 (2012), pp. 237–258.
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Richard Shapcott, International Ethics: A critical introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), p. 150.
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Ramsbotham and Woodhouse, Humanitarian Intervention, pp. 14–18.
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See David Rieff, A bed for the night: humanitarianism in crisis (London: Vintage, 2002).
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David Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
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Thomas Christiano, The Rule of the Many: Fundamental Issues in Democratic Theory (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996).
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35
Claudia Card, Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, Genocide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 15–16.
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36
Claudia Card, Atrocity Paradigm: A Secular Theory of Evil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 211–234.
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Liberal Interventionism, Humanitarian Ethics, and the Responsibility to Protect
In: Global Responsibility to ProtectThis paper examines the lack of engagement between liberal political philosophers and humanitarians on the issue of humanitarian intervention. It argues that the recent emergence of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) agenda provides a great opportunity to overcome this mutual disinterest in each other’s positions. R2P, especially as formulated by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, is fairly demanding. In order to formulate an adequate response, liberals and humanitarians need to reconsider their positions. In this respect, insights provided by liberal political theory are helpful to humanitarians. Firstly, liberal reasoning offers justifications for potential restrictions of the humanitarian scope of concern in the course of halting mass atrocities. Second, liberal values indicate how humanitarians can respond to the challenges posed by post-war reconstruction. Conversely, humanitarian considerations should prompt liberals to think harder about the conduct of military intervention, as well as the material basis of successful post-atrocity reconstruction.
| All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 759 | 167 | 17 |
| Full Text Views | 345 | 27 | 3 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 250 | 62 | 8 |